If you’re a (graduating) computer science student, it might feel nigh-impossible to land a computer science internship or job. How do you make sure your resume showcases your expertise and skills at the start of your career?
Fortunately, over the years, we’ve helped thousands of computer science students kickstart their careers with great internships and first jobs. With stunning resume templates and pro advice, you’ll be well on your way to your new CS career.
What Matters Above All: Skills & Work Experience
As recruiters look over your computer science internship resume, they want to see if you’re proficient enough to write good code, based on your experience and skills.
Even though you’re in the early stages of your career, you’ll already have picked up hard skills (like through academic projects, extracurricular work, or coding challenges). All you need to do is highlight them!
That’s why you need to use the skills section to clearly showcase your knowledge. Include hard skills, such as (back- and front-end) languages like Python or JavaSript, frameworks like Django or Spring, and tools like GitHub. Focus on clearly mentioning technical skills instead of mentioning soft skills like software testing or project management.
9 top computer science internship skills
- HTML(5)/CSS
- JavaScript
- C#/C++
- React.js
- Python (Django)
- Ruby (Ruby on Rails)
- GitHub
- SQL
- PHP
Sample computer science internship work experience bullet points
What’s the goal of your computer science internship resume? In a nutshell, you want to convince the recruiter you’re a budding programmer or coder in the making.
The best way to do that is to clearly demonstrate the impact or outcome your previous responsibilities led to. This way, it’s easy to see what benefit you could add to the team.
Even if you’ve only worked on personal projects or done assignments in class, focus on results achieved or the overall process. Did you debug more lines of code than others? Received good feedback on a mock mobile app you developed? Created an app that was runner-up in a coding competition?
Spend a few minutes thinking of your impact, and then make sure it goes onto your resume. Still stuck? Here are some examples.
- Created an interactive application using JavaScript allowing users to log in and leave movie reviews, with an adoption rate of 84% in our college film club
- Collaborated with 4 students to create interactive websites using ReactJS for 10 small businesses
- Mentored 9 computer science freshmen and provided code reviews of their first CS projects
- Designed a mobile application to aggregate apartment listings on Android, then learned Swift to port it to iOS
- Voluntarily provided monthly code reviews for local eCommerce companies, providing input preventing lack of scalability
Top 5 Tips for Your Computer Science Internship Resume
- Focus on hard skills
- It’s not uncommon that an ATS will scan your computer science internship application, so you want to include key hard skills like programming languages or frameworks. Weave in soft skills like collaboration or project management in the work experience section.
- Don’t exaggerate
- While you want to come across as a stellar candidate who’s extremely knowledgeable, don’t lie or exaggerate about your knowledge or skills. If you’ve used BootStrap or Angular just a handful of times, it probably shouldn’t be on your resume.
- Focus on quantifiable metrics
- Whenever possible, use numbers to showcase your impact; this lands better than being vague. Mention how many users an app you developed has, or highlight how many lines of code you debugged. It makes a difference!
- Include context for your skills
- Don’t just write out every programming language or library you’re familiar with: show how you’ve used them in action. By providing context, recruiters can better visualize your impact.
- Don’t wax poetic
- Just because you’re early on in your career doesn’t mean you should overcompensate on your computer science internship resume. If it’s too long, you’ll lose the recruiter’s attention and miss out on an interview opportunity.
Yes, but only if you customize the objective to each job. Recruiters can spot generic fluff a mile away! Focus on any standout skills you have and how you see yourself fitting into the team, like:
Future computer science graduate with demonstrated experience in full-stack software development and 4+ years of experience in JavaScript and Python. Excited to work in a creative organization like J-Man Software and create scalable code to showcase Portland’s thriving art scene through digital mediums.
You’ll want to focus on providing even deeper context into projects you’ve worked on and emphasizing your soft skills. Essentially, you should use your resume to highlight your impact, but generate a cover letter to dive into the exciting details.
At most, one page! If you can’t fill it up, that’s fine: even senior software engineers should keep their resume to one page. If you’ve got the essentials mentioned above (and contact info!), you should be good.
